Solace Crafting News

We’re thrilled to share the latest major update for Solace Crafting! While this update doesn’t include that many visible changes or gameplay enhancements just yet, it lays critical groundwork for integrating the progress we’ve been making on the beta branch. This milestone marks a pivotal step in preparing the game for the exciting features and improvements on the horizon.

Work on the beta branch is still in full swing, and while not all gameplay features are reintroduced or enhancements finalized, we’re eager for you to explore what’s already shaping up. If you're new here or returning from a long hiatus, we encourage you to dive into the beta branch and take a peek at the recent Producer’s Letters for an insider’s perspective on the future of Solace Crafting.

Thank you for your continued support as we build towards something truly special!

Beta changes:

v 1.1.1.4 2024.12.24
- Added more harvesting animations
- Reworked plains and desert biome math
- Fixed a bug causing FOV to zoom in and out repeatedly
- Improved and added further weapon animation support
- Improved shadow quality and reduced jittering

v 1.1.1.3 2024.12.20
- Stopped a slope sliding bug
- Added some new weapons
- Added a staff projectile
- Bow aiming, firing, and damage all working
- Improved biome spawn logic in several places
- Fixed several bugs related to combat causing monsters to float away, spin, or not respond
- Reintroduced basic harvesting
- Harvesting tool auto-swapping WIP, bare hand animation not implemente yet
- Fixed bandit block/dodge logic being way too frequent
- Improved swapping between different weapons
- Enemies will now auto-target on damage, even if out of their normal range
- Fixed being unable to catch your breath treading water
- Fixed highlands being too white
- Fixed a lot of flora improperly spawning under water

Live changes:

- Fixed a town build error that was spamming anonymous error reports

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta.

Join us in Discord!

Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

Greetings and welcome to the third Producer's Letter for Solace Crafting.

I'm Fab, and today, we're going to spend a little time talking game design and what we have in mind for the near-future of Solace Crafting in that area.

Game design is a vast and rich discipline, in that it pertains to any and all aspects that will determine the kind of experience the player will ultimately have. From the numbers that go into a combat system to the way a specific interaction feels, or even the psychology of certain goals and moments of gameplay, or the way lore informs experience, as game designers we must be on top of all that and more.

Solace Crafting is a vast and systems-rich game, with plenty to do. However, if the What can be quite clear most of the time (explore, fight, harvest, build…), streamlining the How, the Why and the What For is part of the update strategy we have recently embarked on.

As those among you who already play the game know, Solace Crafting is named after Solaces, the crystalline nodes around which you will indeed Craft and Build, from a simple workshop at first to an expanding town later on.

Being the central concept of the game, we felt there was much more we could do with them in terms of tying things up together and creating a stronger game. So as we currently update many front end aspects of the experience, such as graphics, controller and enemies, we are preparing to launch a revamp of Solaces themselves.

In the multiverse of Khora, that you’ve been exploring through your worlds creation in Solace Crafting, Solaces act as nodes in a network of energy, enabling forces to circulate. You’ve seen this from the way you can use them as spawn points and fast travel points. Another aspect of Solaces we will be expanding as we tie their gameplay tighter together, is their function as a reality stabilizer or maybe even as a reality manipulator, and their relationship with the player character itself.

We call player characters (and ultimately you, dear players), Astrals, which is also a sort of short for Astral Prodigies, that is souls that have awakened, consciously or not, to the endless breadth of the multiverse and can exist within its worlds. Astrals are connected to Solaces and can operate them in ways others cannot.

First, we plan to make the Solace’s upgrade cycle much more central to your experience. As you venture out, not only will you want to come back to the Solace regularly for crafting and maintenance, but also to upgrade and empower the Solace itself, discovering new functions and powers it grants you.

Second, the worlds of Khora, which you explore and inhabit, will contain scores of pre-existing Solaces. These we call historic Solaces, for they were here before you and have things to bequeath you, from mere lore to new opportunities to weigh upon your worlds.

These Solaces you find, out there in the worlds, could take you to hidden locations, allow you to manipulate time, weather, life cycles within biomes, grant you new powers lasting or temporary, and many more things.

All Solaces exist thanks to a mysterious focus of energy, called by some an Astral Egg, which you can harvest. However, doing so will destroy the Solace, but the Astral Egg can be carried to manifest a new Solace elsewhere or empower an existing one.

This loop of exploring, finding Solaces, interacting with them and deciding what to do with each and with its Astral Egg will be much more prominent in the updated Solace Crafting we are headed to.

The goal of this looming update is to infuse your gameplay with more meaning, with a lot more Why and What For to your actions in the game. So that having a lot that you can possibly do in Solace Crafting also means a lot more reasons to do each thing and to commit to a specific path of play.

This series of updates touching on the game fundamentals should begin around late December to January, and follow on through. We are still very much focused at the moment on more technical or artistic aspect to bring Solace Crafting into the current times in terms of looks and feel, but we are already hard at work planning those gameplay/experience steps as well.

New, or updated ways to interact with the world, will be a thing as well, as previously hinted at. New locomotion modes, more dynamic harvesting, more exciting obstacle navigation and many more.

It’s a titanic undertaking. An interesting thing is, the more experience you have working on games, the more even a small update turns out to be imposing in terms of implications and repercussions. I can remember, way back before getting involved in game design and production, thinking Oh, the devs should do this or that to improve the game. Lots of grand ideas which, on paper, would have made the game better. Now, after about a decade and a half hands-on, every new feature I plan, every new change gets me like this is going to be so much to do…

But we keep pushing, because nothing’s more beautiful than a vision fulfilled and a playerbase happy. It’s a beautiful job, a great opportunity, and as I always say, success and fulfillment follow a lot more easily when you love what you do, love the people you’re doing it with and love the people you’re doing it for.

This was intended as a Producer’s Letter, not quite a Love Letter, but we all know how for Kyle this has been a labour of love and so how could I join this beautiful undertaking with any less than these same feelings?

So here we are. Happy to be here and looking forward to it all!

- Fab

Lots of new things in this patch! Not all immediately obvious. Performance is up quite a bit, lots of new environment effects including weather, fireflies, birds, wind, two-handed weapon animations, large mountain stamps fixes, and so on!

More monsters, more weapons, and the first set of new locations set to make their appearance next week!



v 1.1.1.2 2024.12.06
- Added player damage numbers
- Sword animation tuning
- 2h Sword animations
- Fixed some moutain splat import problems
- Fixed height blending of stamps with non-zero edges
- Recolored cliff texture
- Implemented new day/night cycle
- Implemented new weather systems
- Implemented over a dozen new environment effects like birds, falling leaves, etc
- Fixed camera and movement working while in menus
- Fixed large stamp spawn performance issues
- Improved new AI spawn performance

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta.

Join us in Discord!

Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

Continuing onward with new technology improvements, this patch expands on the new world generation technology to spawn large locations procedurally throughout the world. Currently we've only implemented mountains as they're the most obvious to spot, but we'll now be expanding this to work with other biome based locations.

Some of the new mountains are currently blending a bit sharply with their surrounding, I will be fixing that tomorrow. And biomes will need to blend to match these large locations as well.

The player controller is also continually undergoing upgrades at the moment. This patch adds swimming, increases the angle at which players begin to slide, adds health bars and damage numbers, and removes the fall damage that was cause players to fall flat and not get back up. We've already got a few more things in the pipe, just not quite ready to upload right this moment.

Happy Thanksgiving! My wife and son are also back home now, at last! so we've got a very busy, sometimes very noisy household. It took a couple days to get settled back into a home that had been abandoned for the better part of 3 weeks,

v 1.1.1.1 2024.11.28
- Added 5 more mountains
- Expanded large stamp system to work anywhere
- Temporarily blending the edges of large stamps
- Added swimming capabilities
- Removed fall damage
- Increased the player slide angle
- Added health bars and damage numbers

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.

To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta.

Join us in Discord!

Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

Greetings Adventurers!

I'm sorry that my personal life has repeatedly delayed this momentous patch, which I intend to explain, but we've got a lot done these past few months, and we've got a lot to talk about, so let's get into it!

First and foremost, I need to make it very clear that [h3]this patch is not at all intended as a playtest.[/h3] This patch is intended as a preview for players to take a look at, to feel the new controls, and to provide early feedback. This patch contains thousands of new lines of code, hundreds of new assets, and focuses primarily on the following:

• Overworld biome graphical assets
  
• Enhanced player movement
  
• Action based combat
  
• Enemy artificial intelligence
  
• World generation technology improvements

This preview patch is only available via the beta branch and has several features that are temporarily turned off, or simply have no effect, such as:

• Avatar creation: no matter what you create or wear you will be a guy with a cape.
  
• Weather is completely absent. The day/night cycle and skies are also being reworked.
  
• Harvesting is largely impossible as again, this is not a playtest patch.
  
• Combat. In the overworld nothing can hurt you. If you travel elsewhere, you will likely not be able to hurt anything else.
  

[h2]So, what is the purpose of this patch?[/h2]
The above mentioned new features all reach deep into the core of the many systems that make up Solace Crafting, and are foundational in moving the game from it's old haphazard design into the new well oiled machine we are planning for it to become. That means, defining and upholding an expandable art style, and improving the many different ways that players interact with the world. Movement, combat, harvesting, crafting, leveling, exploring, all of these systems are heavily dependent on how the world is shaped and presented to the player, which is why we have added a number of new technologies to bring hand-crafted points of interest into the game world, from a small copse of trees, to an entire mountain village.

These foundational changes set the framework for us to move onto the next step of rebuilding the many different types of content that already exist in Solace Crafting.
For example, we have now a wolf and a bandit working with out entirely new AI systems which means we can add any type of humanoid creature using the bandit's AI as a starting template, and though a bit trickier we can use the wolf template for other non-bi-pedal creatures.
The large mountain that you should be able to see near the start area is hand-crafted, and hand-painted. It's the only mountain in the game right now, but now that the system works we can use it to bring in dozens of mountains, canyons, oasis, islands, anything we want using the same systems.
The player character will now always start with a claymore so that you can try out either weapon combat or the hand to hand combos. Likewise, these are proofs of concept for how weapon animation sets will work. Magic and healing will of course be added in very shortly, now that these foundations have been put in place. Climbing, sliding, mounts, and other features are also being built into and tested with these new systems and will be brought online as we progress.

[h2]So what's next?[/h2]
Now comes the fun part. New monsters, new animals, new skills, new weapons, new resources, new locations... content! Content can't exist without systems, and now that we've got the first major group of systems in and working, it's time to make proper use of them. And that doesn't mean reinstating all of the old content, we will be introducing almost entirely new content that better aligns with our long term goals of a well populated fantasy multiverse filled with things to do and lore to explore, as well as a variety of play-styles to go about experiencing them with.

There is a long list of advanced features that we will be talking about and implementing as time moves on, but we are going to take things step by step. Having said that, we are working on a roadmap and would very much like everyone's input on that when we're able to reveal it, as our vision for the future of Solace Crafting is entirely dependent on pleasing our community and attracting new adventurers from all around the globe!

The current build is also lacking in performance in some areas yet. There are a lot of tricks and puzzles to making Unity perform better, but now is not yet the time to be spending much time on that area.

[h2]What happened?[/h2]
There's no real point in going too deep down this discussion, but we had a kind of perfect storm of unfortunate events one after the other. Our git account went over the limit imposed by its developers, not by like our account tier or anything like that, and became completely unusable right as all three of us currently working on the game tried to merge all of our work together. While waiting for support to help us out I tried a few things to fix the problem, but actually made things worse. Once support picked up our case I was deep into trying to put things together, when my wife's water broke! Our son is happy and healthy, but my wife met several complications and is unfortunately still in the hospital, though it's looking like she will be released in another few days. I lost nearly a week trying to repair the damage and ultimately having to redo several days of work.
Such is game development though, problems come and problems go. I have ample time to get us back onto our original schedule, and we've already made a lot of good progress.

[h2]In closing[/h2]
I really hope everyone enjoys the new art style and can understand why the old style was really just making everything much more expensive and difficult to work with. I'm confident the new combat system will grow into a feature rich, player choice driven class system. And above all I look forward to bringing out new content, quests, stories, and treasure for players to engage with and uncover as we move through the next stages of Solace Crafting development!

Best wishes and happy gaming!
Kyle


This preview patch is only available via Beta branch.
To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta.

Join us in Discord!

Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!
(Our Patreon will soon be undergoing a revamp of its own)